ft ground

Pouch Vardøgr 01

Where were you when the world stopped turning that September day, and people fell silent as muffled drums approached from the west, and squads of these creatures the color of the air behind them painted, and they had the semblance of streaming pennons as they took hold of hands, thus making beautiful snowflakes that went in the wrong direction out of every person you have ever corresponded with, Out of every person on planet earth. She stood watching it from an angle, from damaged staircases that hung at dangerous angles, unable to support her weight, wishing she could reach up and hold it in place with her bare hands.

Before he disappeared Constance was told by the women in the coffee shop that M. J lived locally. He arrived at the hotel when he did on foot through its Courtland Street cloaca. She dreamt it a martyrs hike up from that abject dust bedeviled undercut. Nobody came from its murk without some cloudiness of vision lingering like clouds caught up in the eyelashes. He only appeared in the throngs of conventions on the floor of the atrium, surfacing in some key point on the first day of the proceedings at which the population, upon first encountering it, would provide him the greatest instantaneous burst of people, and would stay, infrequently floating around the hotel for the entire duration of a convention once wordlessly sleeping beneath an outcropping of stacked stacking furniture in a disused ballroom enfolded like a cramp around a frail Constance whom the train had left weary on the platform. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryant woke up at 6 a.m., when his alarm clock went off. After one One Dose of the plasmid Vaccine, he followed a couple to their hotel. Hours later, in the hotel bar, the management spotted him there. He fled on a bicycle, but was caught a fifteen blocks away. He gave his occupation as “unemployed artist” and “anarchist” on the police report. but it turned out that he had a gift for the precise hand that needlepoint requires and was able to disappear and reappear at a completely diffcially place in an instant by touching a spot on his own neck. He then was in a kind of daze and almost inaccessible to any suggestion. The trance caused him to have further revelations and disturbing visions. Four black figures arose from the depths of a murky swamp. Dark, solid-black figures arose from the portals. The figures started to take shape. Just then 5 black figures arose from the canyon. Suddenly six black figures arose from the insides of the glow and formed a horizontal line. These innumerable spectres that hung over our forebears but which no longer hang over us still plagued him, and even with the absence of thunder and lightning, it was enough to cause him to immolate himself and his lover in the church consumed by flames. All of these events, took approximately 15 seconds, during which 12 people were dead and 10 more were wounded. Police considered few of the findings to be of note, except multiple tubes of hydrocortisone cream and a fairly extensive collection of the fiction of C.S. Lewis.

I recall spending an inordinate amount of time below the horizon in a concrete trench. Even if the proportion of time I recall it occupying is flawed it remains a delightful prompt and a sign-off PK uses a great deal in his ‘e-flares’ to me “from below the horizon.” Like most plains cities (except the terrifyingly blind approach to Chicago from the west) Fort Worth rises up slowly, almost endlessly, from the south. A railroad could make the ascent across the rising peel of its roofscape. It rises so gently that I was dizzied by the immediacy of its presence like the chance palpation of some tumorous mass. “Where did that come from?” It might seem more likely that a city like Pittsburgh erupting out of the Fort Pitt Tunnel nothing would promote the effect more. However the lull of the slow creep towards something improbably contradictory to the surrounding milieu (either of the story (like the drive)) or of the cultural context (a piece of disruptive art that functions by virtue of its exploitation of convention (banality, Koons)) is more unsettling (effective?) to me. I prefer transitions and unapparent distinctions to sore thumbs. I prefer to generate my own stopping points over landmarks and guided tours. I drove straight to the Modern. My head was almost so clear that I didn’t know where I was, where I had just been, or what my hopes were with an empty sky that would be too easy to forget. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t mind needles or the sight of blood in the slightest but I still get dizzy, clammy and nauseous a few minutes into the ritual, but I can assure whoever reads this, dying feels good as A dream in which you are aware that you are dreaming, a dream in which you’re flying, a dream in which you’ve experienced telepathic communication with a version of yourself from another world, you both spontaneously explode, and in that place you had found some old secret cupboard or hole in the wall, and in that place you will re-unite with that soul, and in that place you are as close as you’ll ever be to every child’s dream of being able to live forever in an instant, or an instant in forever? Where can I buy Instant Hair Thickening Products like MegaThik?

When the only remaining light in the sky seems to be thrown back over the horizon like the strangely peaceful hair of a drowned woman the light in the windows of the studios stacked in the north wall of the courtyard arises. I’ve had an affinity for the archetype of the glowing window at dusk since I worked a construction project on a farm in central Georgia in my early twenties. Their warmth and their ability to telegraph a completely identifiable spatial tone I felt was strong enough to humor the guts like a pull of brandy from a real St. Bernard as I died across the snow from a Swiss chalet and its twinkling purr. Of course that transcendent interior space of milkglass lamps, wood and upholstery settees, and beapron’d grandmothers pulling hot olive boules from the oven to nibble with some Glühwein is a statistically improbable confluence. It is the obstruction of the sheer curtain that makes this illusory phenomenon possible. It both allows the light to escape and protects the reality of the situation. The process of uniformly distributing light across the fabric surface turns the window solid, an object that distinguishes itself from the night air and from the building being consumed by shade. It is alone and it speaks. The windows of the architecture studios weren’t doing quite that. They lacked the sheer curtains and a worm’s eye view of the rooms could be seen through them, mostly ceiling. They still transmitted a uniform glow from bouncing throughout the large white rooms that seemed to hit the glass and stop there, halted by the not-yet-complete darkness of the courtyard. Read the rest of this entry »

Even more difficulty in focusing came from the call of the owls from either side of the courtyard. I wanted so much to see one of them coast by. I thought back to my mother and I at the Merritt Square Mall in the parking lot at midmorning, both of us looking at a decoy owl on the coping thirty feet up for ten minutes tricking ourselves into seeing it turn its head or ruffle its feathers. Things out of place in the sad order of our world have the power to become far more fertile grounds for memory (or exaggeration) than their contextual counterparts. I think this is maybe one of PK’s draws on surrealism. These things set off chain reactions of assumptions that can quiver the foundations we rely on in other systems or entities. I recall reading about a coyote wandering into a Quizno’s in Chicago and nosing its way to a cooler full of drinks. Read the rest of this entry »

The next stratum of furniture I move stacks above the guardrail and I can’t see the doors across the atrium at all. I clamber over what is left in front of the door, turn on the light, hesitate, the voice still hums. The form isn’t moving. The curtain bulges in more detail with soft square edges like broken limbs. Hello. Why did I wait so long to speak back? I don’t speak to empty rooms, sometimes not for days anywhere. Nothing. Just pulling the leading edge of the curtain away from the tile I slide my head in slowly. A silent tumbledown column of bedding, cushions, and towels fills the tub and limply offers a drapery hand over the curb between porcelain and oilcloth. Mandalas on the bedding of felled cypress clearings burned so black as each shivered in funereal drafts everything in my eyes was swelling with an empty white light. It made my face ache like daysleep and my eyes dry and the wall of furniture where the front doors were and the wall still whispering to me, louder now, I am disoriented and breathless in a rhythm of words that repeated like a chant, I don’t want to be, I don’t want to be. Between the two identical walls of furniture I rear back. All paths are the same, all accidents but I choose and throw myself into one rickety mess that topples into the sunlight like powdered milk on death rattles floats. The television in the room sings to me, a chorus of women and men that I ignore, that I can’t help but ignore. My limbs hurt and my lips are bleeding onto my tongue. A lumpy long form is bound down in the center of the impeccably made bed I dream of in the final moments of each night of sleep, when I sleep in the summer sun frozen with panic of this failure. I fold my arms in some sagging arch over the furniture scree, put my face in my hands, the sunlight skin red, and sleep.

Inhale a voice muffled not sharp enough to form words. Spirits deep beneath a grave or people in next-door rooms don’t speak in words, they speak in masses like tides invisible but creeping and irrefutable because the ocean is so black and silent without them. I would have screamed but I do this job alone. I threw the doors back open. Although a voice with no face floats through my mind and eyes without wake, and I couldn’t articulate something in this way if I could stay it, I knew the voice came from behind the furniture. The wood grain in a low desk quivered with its vibrations. I reached the front edge of the bathroom door jamb about six feet into the room. The dislodged furniture now formed complete barricades on either side of the door in the ambulatory. Only a running dive tumble over the guardrail absolves me of putting all the furniture back in place. Right now is the time for a choice. To excavate the bathroom door will fill the niche in front of the doors. The voice from the furniture has grown clearer. I don’t recall which side of the bathroom doors opens. If the voice is coming from the bathroom and the handle is on this side of the door I only have to move a few pieces of furniture. A circular writing table on a metal pedestal, a bale of cushions, and two luggage racks and there is the silver handle. It swings in and through the slot of space between the sculpture and the door jamb the full mirror reflects obliquely back to the shower curtain, bulged out, the mass slumped over the curb of the tub I think is moving but the voice is still lost and sexless. The sink is filled black and slick but the room is dark, it is probably water. It smells like soap. The lightswitch is over the counter not on my side of the jamb; I can’t reach it.